ICC Public Forum, London, 13 June: '20 years since the collapse of the eastern bloc'

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International Communist Current


Public Forum

20 years since the collapse of the eastern bloc: whatever happened to the New World Order?

Remember the New World Order proclaimed by George Bush Senior in 1991 soon after the eastern bloc and the USSR collapsed?

We were going to enter a new world of peace and prosperity.

20 years later ‘peace’ has meant the first Gulf war, the war in the Balkans, the massacres in Rwanda and the Congo, the NATO bombing of Serbia, the September 11 atrocity, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, slaughter in Lebanon and Gaza, chaos in Pakistan, horror in Sri Lanka…

‘Prosperity’ has meant the recession of the early 90s, the collapse of the Asian Tigers and Dragons, the stagnation of Japan, the bankruptcy of Russia and Argentina, the bursting of one debt-fuelled bubble after another, culminating in the ‘credit crunch’ and the threat of a global depression.

We were told as well that the fall of the eastern bloc was the ‘end of communism’, the ‘failure of marxism’ and the definitive victory of capitalism.

In fact the last 20 years have vindicated the marxist view that capitalism is a senile, decaying system. What collapsed in the east was not communism but a particularly weak and rigid form of state capitalism. It was an expression of the crisis of capitalism, not of communism. And today the same underlying crisis is hitting the most powerful economies on the planet with unprecedented force.

More than ever, the only alternative to obsolete capitalism is indeed communism, based not on the statification of wage slavery but on its revolutionary abolition.

Come and discuss with us at our forum on

2pm, Saturday 13 June
Conway Hall
Red Lion Square
London WC1
www.internationalism.org